milliAmp

Firefox 3 was launched this morning (5am NZ time). Mozilla Foundation have made a huge marketing effort to the point of setting a world record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours. Now, you’d expect, with a market share just shy of 20% of the global web browser market share and that kind of marketing, you would need some serious distribution technology.

Mozilla.com web traffic is pushing well over 2 Gigabits a second of just pure HTTP traffic. That is in addition to the 13 Gigabits a second or so of download traffic. We are still at around 14,000 download/minute and mozilla.com is responding well! Go Mozilla community and IT team! schrep – June 17th, 2008

Considering the numerous reports of the Mozilla.com website being down for at least the first hour of the record attempt, lloks like something in the middle couldn’t quite handle the load. At 15Gb/s that is close enough to 2GB/s, that is fairly large.

The official counter at SpreadFirefox.com shows 2,135,640 as at midday here, only 7 hours in. Either their counter is off or things have calmed considerably. If they were still blasting data out at 2GB/s the counter would be closer to 7 million by now.

I’m not going to go in to the features of Firefox 3 too much but for Mac Firefox junkies, it is a massive update. The interface is now using native widgets and is much faster. It also brings Firefox back into the running with Safari and Opera again in terms of standards support.

If you download it today, from http://getfirefox.com you’ll help Mozilla set a world record, the servers seem to be coping now so it downloads quite quickly however the Mac version weighs in just over 17MB which is on the steep side.